February 2018 - Page 5 of 23

Friday, February 23rd, 2018

America’s Complex Relationship With Guns

KIM PARKER, JULIANA MENASCE HOROWITZ, RUTH IGIELNIK, BAXTER OLIPHANT AND ANNA BROWN, - Pew Research Center

Stephan: My view of most conversations about guns, no matter the position of the speaker, is they are grounded more in emotion than facts. So here are some actual facts. This is a lengthy research paper but I encourage you read all of it. If we are going to debate this issue let's at least confine ourselves to facts, not the fantasies that I routinely hear and read in the media. My wife is a teacher and a number of my readers are teachers. To a person they hate the proposal made by Donald Trump and the NRA and all of them say no one who actually knows anything about education would propose such nonsense as arming teachers. At this recent massacre by the way there was an armed guard in the building.

Credit: David Ryder/Stringer

As a nation, the U.S. has a deep and enduring connection to guns. Integrated into the fabric of American society since the country’s earliest days, guns remain a point of pride for many Americans. Whether for hunting, sport shooting or personal protection, most gun owners count the right to bear arms as central to their freedom. At the same time, the results of gun-related violence have shaken the nation, and debates over gun policy remain sharply polarized.

A new Pew Research Center survey attempts to better understand the complex relationship Americans have with guns and how that relationship intersects with their policy views.

The survey finds that Americans have broad exposure to guns, whether they personally own one or not. At least two-thirds have lived in a household with a gun at some point in their lives. And roughly seven-in-ten – including 55% of those who have never personally owned a gun – say they have fired a gun at some point. Today, three-in-ten U.S. adults say they own a […]

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Friday, February 23rd, 2018

The Real Reason Congress Banned Assault Weapons in 1994 – and Why It Worked

Christopher Ingraham, Reporter - Reader Supported News/The Washington Post

Stephan: Lost in a lot of what I am hearing and reading is this very important fact: Assault rifles are carefully and expensively designed to put into the hands of a single soldier in battle a weapon giving them the ability to put out of combat a large number of opposition individuals. The weapon calibre, the round, and its speed produces a very different impact profile than a round from an ordinary hand gun. Opponents hit by a round from one of these weapons do not get up, even if they are not killed immediately. From a military perspective that makes very good tactical sense. But it doesn't make any sense being commercially available. This report expands on this very important point, ands provides accurate data, of what the now-lapsed ban was all about.

Last week’s horrific massacre of 14 students and three staff members in Parkland, Fla., has reinvigorated the national debate over assault weapons. A Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday, for instance, found that 67 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of gun owners, say they favor such a ban — the highest level of support seen on this question since 20 children and six educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Critics of bans on assault weapons, however, say they do little to save lives. The NRA correctly points out that assault weapons are used only in a tiny fraction of gun crimes. The gun rights group also notes that a federally funded study of the previous assault weapons ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Similar points have been made in arguments against a new ban in publications running the ideological gamut from Breitbart to the New York Times to HuffPost.

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Friday, February 23rd, 2018

San Juan Mayor Calls for End to Puerto Rico’s Colonial Status Amid Slow Hurricane Maria Recovery

, - Democracy Now

Stephan: I have been following San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz since she first appeared on the Rachel Maddow show right after Hurricane Maria. She has always struck me as a very sensible local elected official deeply committed to the wellbeing of her community. This interview puts flesh, literally, on the current data to give us the real picture on what is going on there. It is my view that the treatment received in Houston, Port Arransas, the American Virgins and, particularly, Puerto Rico, is something to which we should be paying very close attention. The failure of the Trump administration to deal with these crises is not only a disaster at this time, it is also a predictor of what we can expect if policies stay on their current tracks as climate change events become bigger, more frequent, and far more dramatic. Puerto Rico could very easily become San Diego, or Charleston, South Carolina. We are not facing reality.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz
Credit: Public Radio International

Five months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, swaths of the island still have no electricity, while food and water supplies have been slow to arrive. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, has been hit by a series of scandals, after it was revealed that only a fraction of the 30 million meals slated to be sent to the island after Hurricane Maria was actually delivered. FEMA approved a $156 million contract for a one-woman company to deliver the 30 million meals. But in the end, FEMA canceled the contract after she delivered only 50,000 meals, in what FEMA called a logistical nightmare. This came after FEMAgave more than $30 million in contracts to a newly created Florida company which failed to deliver a single tarp to Puerto Rico. For more, we speak with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As Puerto Rico marks five months since Hurricane Maria battered […]

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Friday, February 23rd, 2018

Church blesses assault weapons because ‘returning Christ’ will pack an AR-15

BOB BRIGHAM, - Raw Story

Stephan: The linkage of fundamentalist christian cults, whatever their denomination, and guns is a significant social factor that should never be ignored. This is how extreme it gets.

Parishioners in Pennsylvania are planning to attend church services armed with AR-15 rifles so that they can be blessed, WNEP reported.

“This will be a big thing for us. It’s a new stage for us because it incorporates the rod of iron, as it is in Revelations. Revelations talks about the returning Christ ruling with the rod of iron,” said Tim Elder.

Sanctuary Church and Rod of Iron Ministries is an offshoot of the Unification Church, founded by the late Sun Myung Moon. It is led by his son, the Rev. Sean Moon.

“This rod of iron is the AR-15, in today’s terms,” Elder claimed.

Elder is referencing Revelation 2:27.

“And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father,” the King James translation reads. Other translations refer to an “iron scepter” instead of “rod of iron.”

Sun Myung Moon also founded the conservative Washington Times.

The AR-15 blessing ceremony will occur in Dreher Township in […]

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Thursday, February 22nd, 2018

Newborn survival rates in US only slightly better than in Sri Lanka

Karen McVeigh, - The Guardian (U.K.)

Stephan: You would think that the fact that a child born in the U.S., in a medical center at vast expense actually doesn't have much more of a chance of surviving their first year than a child born in a Southeast Asian farming village that is delivered by a midwife would be a matter of great public debate. But it isn't. Why is that? Because we don't have a healthcare system in the U.S., we have an illness profit system, and our social safety net is an embarrassment.

A rural midwife holds a newborn baby in El Llano, Guatemala, where rural midwives deliver six of every 10 babies.
Credit: Rodrigo Abd/AP

The risk of dying as a newborn in the US is only slightly lower than the risk for babies in Sri Lanka and Ukraine, according to Unicef. (emphaasis added)

A report by the UN children’s agency found that five newborn babies die around the world every minute – a total of about 2.6 million a year. The figure was described as “alarmingly high”, not least because 80% of the deaths were from preventable causes.

A million babies draw their last breath the same day they took their first. A further 2.6 million are stillborn worldwide, said the report, entitled Every Child Alive.

The risk of dying as a newborn, which is closely linked to a country’s income level, varies enormously by place. Babies born in Japan, Singapore and Iceland stand the best chance of survival, while those in Pakistan, Central African Republic and Afghanistan face the worst odds, said […]